The Server Room Blog

'You are not Alone' - When it comes to moving from RISC

eoin.j.mcconnell@intel.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:18:41 GMT

Change is hard, but it can be done and the benefits of change usually outweigh the concerns which were on our minds before we made the change.

When making the change from running your solution on a RISC architecture to running that solution on a Xeon architecture, the biggest concern usually relates to whether that solution will run at the same level as on the previous architecture. I'm not talking about performance specifically, but usually the question is around whether operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Solaris on Xeon will meet your business needs for yourmission critical solutions.

Like the underlying improvements in the microprocessor, I believe that there have also been major fundamental improvements in the operating systems that run on both today's and the soon to come next generation microprocessors (sorry, my obligatory Nehalem-EX advertisement... coming soon in 2010). A decision made many years ago to run your solution on Unix/RISC was made based on comparing all the different variables at that time to pick what was right for your business. At that time you likely decided that your solution would not run on these operating systems, these operating systems were not suitable for your mission critical workloads etc. Probably right decision at that point, but like everything else decisions get revisited based upon the here and now and what may have been the right solution in the past (and right decision) may not be the right solution for your needs now.

I wanted to share some thoughts specifically on Redhat Linux today. Lets take a little look at Redhat Enterprise Linux. Current versions of Redhat can deliver what is required for your critical solutions. RHEL is ready and here are some of the reasons cited by Redhat in recent webinars on this topic and my interpretation of their comments

Hosts real-time global mission-critical infrastructures and operations 24 X 7 - its tried and tested by other Enterprises
Enables 5x9s availability in highly secure environments - pretty important to most critical solutions
Contributes measurable reductions to TCO and enables, agile, standardized, and virtualized infrastructures - TCO benefits through standardization
Has major ISVs on-board with the majority of 3rd party Unix applications have Linux and/or Windows versions available - the ISVs that traditionally delivered applications to you based on Unix, also have versions supported on Linux/Windows
Many customer unique applications are developed with programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, or J2EE and can be migrated to Linux and / or Windows - your applications can be moved
Hosts most major database systems standard for your infrastructure - all the major databases run and run well on Linux

One of the other things we encounter a lot is around whether the technical considerations to move from one operating system environment are too high to overcome and outweigh the benefits of moving. There are always technical considerations and things that you need to know to move from one environment to another. However you are not alone in trying to understand these technical considerations. Redhat have done a phenomenal job of documenting the challenges of moving from say Solaris to Linux and have developed a great Strategic Migration Planning Guide. This is available on request. In recent webinars Redhat outline some of the things that you need to consider for the following technical categories

- Development Environment; Kernel tuning; Security; Filesystems; Debugging, tracing, Profiling; Command Differences; Deployment methods; Software Management; Virtualization; Application considerations

In addition to the current versions of Redhat running on Intel architecture, we are also working very closely on future versions that will take advantage of the 20+ new RAS features that are planned for Nehalem-EX - more on that in a future blog

You are not alone, resources, tools and expertize exist to help you make that move and reap the business benefits while still delivering to the requirements of your business. Check out Redhat online tools for more information that dives deeper into all the areas for consideration http://www.redhat.com/migrate/solaris_to_linux/

We think Redhat Linux and Xeon are ready to run your mission critical workloads and solutions...What do you think?

Education at Super Computing 2009

greg.wagnon@intel.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:29:34 GMT

I have to admit, I have never had the opportunity to be involved in HPC, Super Computing, or the communities that have evolved around such things. My first real experience with it was yesterday at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. A conference like any other was my thinking. But, when I started walking around the exhibition area (booths), I was amazed at the number of Universities and education based solutions that were represented.

Here is a quick montage of images that I put together of the educational facilities I saw and took a picture of...

I am sure there are many, many more, but I only captured the few that are represented here.

The one on the bottom left is not really an educational institution, but rather a company that I stopped and talked with for a few minutes. They essentially offer up their datacenter and supercomputer infrastructure for all the education facilities in the state of Alabama... K-12 and Universities too.

Here is another picture I took of a scout troop that was visiting the event. What a great opportunity for them to see and hear all about the most powerful computers in the world.

Here they are again listening (attentively) to a speaker from NASA talkiing about the expansion of the universe and how we study it.

Education is and should remain a priority for all of us. This is hopefully a good reminder of that. It certainly was for me.

-Greg

Green Storage

curt.e.bruns@intel.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:52:02 GMT

It’s not just about energy-sipping systems—it’s also about your storage footprint

Most of us are familiar with the concept of green IT: increasing energy efficiency across the enterprise to trim costs and optimize resources. While you hear a lot about servers helping to reduce energy usage, not as much is said about storage. Intel and the storage industry are working together to provide green storage solutions, too.

For the storage community, every system has to be cost-effective as well as performance-driven, which means energy efficiency is a key consideration. It starts at the processor level, where the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series is extending the boundaries of energy efficient performance.

Many storage system providers have picked up on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series since it was introduced last March. For example, the HP StorageWorks XP10000* Disk Array and 3000 Enterprise* Virtual Array are based on the new processors. Schooner Information Technology appliances leverage quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors and half a terabyte of Intel® X25-E flash memory. The bottom line for the Schooner appliances is an 80 percent decrease in power and cooling requirements versus ordinary servers.

But green storage isn’t just about power consumption at the processor or system level. An equally important green strategy is to reduce the overall storage footprint, and a number of technologies are available to help IT organizations implement this strategy.

Virtualization is driving huge data center energy savings by greatly reducing the number of physical machines in the data center. As Bob Fine, director of product marketing at Compellent, pointed out at the 2009 Storage Networking World conference last spring, many large enterprises realize that they’re approaching a cap. “They can only get a certain amount of power in their data centers and see virtualization as a way to reduce their power requirements,” says Fine. “Instead of building new data centers, they can stay in the ones they have, saving millions of dollars in the process.”

Many IT managers tell Intel that storage can be a big gating factor when it comes to scaling virtual environments. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series uses Intel® HT Technology within each processor core, doubling the number of threads that can be processed at the same time. This option permits more efficient workloads and enables storage servers to virtualize more applications. Intel HT Technology is also more energy efficient than traditional threaded processing.

Compellent and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), both users of the Intel Xeon processors, recommend reducing the storage footprint in other ways as well. “Limit the amount of content you need to store by using technologies like data deduplication,” advises Asim Zaheer, vice president of product and competitive marketing at HDS. “Also, don’t have wasted capacity or wasted systems—that’s where tiered storage and virtualization come into play.”

Compellent’s Fine sees tiered storage as especially important when using expensive disk resources like solid-state drives (SSD). By limiting SSD to the top tier, a company could save on drive costs and increase storage efficiency. “Only the active data would sit on SSD, and all the inactive data would go onto a tier-three SATA drive,” says Fine. “Since SSD drives are about 10 times the cost of Fibre Channel, it’s very important to gain those kinds of efficiencies.”

Isilon Systems, another user of Intel processors, has a pay-as-you-grow model for its clustered storage products that makes it easier to avoid over-provisioning and wasting power. If a customer needs to add more performance, Isilon can provide nodes with Intel processors and memory, but no storage. If the customer requires capacity only, Isilon sells nodes with just disks. In addition, Isilon uses ColdWatt power supplies, which it says are about 30 percent more efficient than traditional power supplies.

As Intel works with the storage industry to deliver more energy-efficient and high-performance storage solutions, we’d like to know what IT organizations are doing to implement green storage technologies in the data center. If you work in IT and have fresh perspectives to make your organization more efficient, you’re invited to share your ideas here.

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0?

ennis.p.skillern@intel.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:10:06 GMT

Why upgrade your hardware when migrating to SAP ERP 6.0? Because it makes simple, practical, business sense that is all. SAP has identified several key reasons why customers are concerned about migration and several among them are as follows:

· Cost, Cost, Cost

o HW infrastructure cost is highlighted as one of the key barriers of migration

· Business Justification

o Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade the hardware?

· Additional risk of business disruption

o Migration of ERP environment is complex enough…how much more risk is there when upgrading your hardware?

From a cost perspective, the perception that hardware is a barrier to migration can be easily overcome. Based on research, the hardware cost as a percentage of the overall migration cost is only about 7%. That means 93% of the cost is in licensing, consulting, etc, etc. HW costs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and the real $ investment lies elsewhere in the equation.

Is there a compelling business reason to upgrade your hardware? Well…frankly, it does not make sense not to do it. One, we showed above that the hardware investment is minimal compared to SW licensing, consulting, service, etc. Two, the hardware requirements of ERP 6.0 are significantly higher than previous versions. ERP 6.0 requires up to 2.5x more CPU performance, 2.5x more memory and 1.5x more I/O! You will need the increased performance and scalability that Intel provides in our microprocessors. While the ERP performance requirements have increased 2.5x, Intel performance with SAP has increased 10X! Oh, btw…energy efficiency does matter and in your new ERP environment you will be able to consolidate servers and save on power and cooling costs. TCO will be significantly reduced and from hardware investment standpoint, you are likely going to recover the cost of the servers in a very reasonable timeframe.

From my discussions with the IT community, their major concern and number one focus area is to prevent business disruption and downtime. This costs companies real and significant money. The fact is that an ERP migration is a complex enough project managing the strategic, functional and technical portions. Adding a server infrastructure change increases fundamental risk. But, the key here is that it is done often and done successfully. Intel IT has published several whitepapers on the subject and communicated “Best Known Methods” to minimize that risk. A quick summary is inserted here:

Challenge:

• Convert Intel’s Worldwide Warehouse Management Software

• Upgrade from SAP* ERP version 4.7 to 6.0, change the DBMS, and perform a Unicode* conversion as well as a hardware upgrade

• Minimize downtime

Benefit to Intel IT:

• SAP ERP 6.0 improves Intel supportability

• Increases ease of integration to SAP NetWeaver* 7.1 Suite

• Provides access to Enhancement Packs and Enterprise Services

• Intel^® Itanium^®-based servers provide access to 128 GB of memory for database and SAP operations and significantly increased performance from true 64-bit processing

Key Results:

• Reduced downtime of upgrade by 50% by using Intel Architecture

In summary, upgrading your server infrastructure when migrating your ERP environment is a very, very complex task, but form a business perspective, it should be fairly easy to see the true benefits from combining the ERP migration and hardware upgrade at the same time.

Your future data center – is it bigger than a breadbox?

ken.r.lloyd@intel.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:13:55 GMT

These are dog years for servers. Pretty much every year Intel introduces a new Xeon processor. Those who have heard the story recognize this as the Tic Tock model. On Tic years the manufacturing process is updated, on Tock years the chip architecture is updated. Every year customers get a boost in performance, and often a cut in power. Typically this boost is in the 50% neighborhood, enough to make it worth the upgrade, and still achievable by engineering teams on a two year cycle. Except, we are in dog years.

The Nehalem – Xeon 5500 – processor broke all prior boundaries on single generation performance gain. Delivering two to three times the compute capacity of the Xeon 5400 (Harpertown) generation. This is a big change, probably a once in a lifetime change – unless that quantum thing happens in my lifetime. Roughly a 10X performance boost in less than 5 years.

During this same five years we have seen virtualization technology go from a lab project – something for test and dev – to mainstream data center process. In 2005 it would have been heresy to suggest virtualizing the corporate ERP. At that point virtualization overhead on the server could be as high as 25% and the entire server was needed to do “real work”. Fast forward to today. Virtualization technology in both the hypervisor and processor have reduced overhead to only a few percent, AND servers are 10X faster. Not only can you virtualize the ERP, you are irresponsibly wasting resources if you do not. Unless your ERP demands have grown 10X in 5 years, your ERP alone won’t even make a new Xeon 5500 system sweat.

If this advancement wasn’t enough, the announcements last month from Intel about the coming Xeon 7500 (4+ socket) processor were amazing. All the benefits of the Xeon 5500, but on steroids. The new biggest leap ever. With up to eight cores and four memory channels per socket, this is a monster. Your ERP system will be barely a blip in perfmon. It isn’t unreasonable that an entire data center for a SMB business could be virtualized onto one of these beasts. And, how big is a Xeon 7500 server? My guess is about the size of a breadbox…

Reporting live from the Intel booth at Oracle OpenWorld

jason.t.beane@intel.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:23:43 GMT

At Intel, we not only pack a lot of performance in a small form factor, we also pack a lot of great demos and theater presentations into our booth at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco (South Moscone, booth #1621). We have 5 demos from 5 of our customers—Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun—and 3 other demos showcasing Wind River, Intel’s SOA Expressway product, and last, but certainly not least, Intel’s amazing and upcoming Nehalem-EX processor, which you heard Michael Dell praise in his keynote this morning.

Over the course of the three days of our booth at OOW (Monday through Wednesday this week), we will have over 35 brief presentations that will help you plan your requirements for your next generation data center. They are short and sweet, and you can ask all the questions you want. If you simply attend a presentation and get a few more stamps form our demo stations, you can enter to win one of two netbooks that will be given away at the end of each day.

Outside of our booth, you may find us presenting in various partners’ booths and we hope to see you in a session we are having later today (see info below). We had an amazing session yesterday from resident Intel genius, Steve Shaw. The huge room was filled to capacity. At this other session today we will be giving away a netbook. Here are the logistics for today’s session:

ID#: S309892

Title: Ten Ways to Improve J2EE Application Performance on Multicore Systems

Track: Oracle Develop: Enterprise Java and Oracle WebLogic

Date: 13-OCT-09

Time: 17:30 - 18:30

Venue: Hilton Hotel

Room: Yosemite B

We hope to see you around somewhere at Oracle OpenWorld, but if for some reason we miss you entirely, please visit www.intel.com/server for more info on Intel’s fantastic products. Also, please visit Channel Intel on youtube for some videos from the event.

Michael Dell is Bullish on Nehalem-EX in Oracle Open World Keynote

bryce.olson@intel.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:32:43 GMT

Nehalem-EX has been in the news quite a bit over the past several months.

First, in May, Intel described how Nehalem-EX will be at the heart of the next generation of intelligent and expandable high-end Intel server platforms, delivering a number of new technical advancements (Intel Nehalem Architecture, Quick Path Interconnects, 16 threads, 24MB cache, new RAS features like MCA-Recovery, 16 DIMM slots per socket, 128 threads on 8 Socket systems) and boost enterprise computing performance (the greatest gain in generational performance ever seen at Intel.)

Next at IDF in September Intel described how Nehalem-EX would deliver a bigger generational performance improvement than that delivered by the Intel Xeon 5500 processor (including a 3X Nehalem-EX gain in database performance); a large shift in Xeon scalability with over 15 >8S systems anticipated and expandability for the most data demanding enterprise applications, the addition of about 20 RAS capabilities traditionally found in the Intel® Itanium processor family – along with a demonstration of MCA-Recovery. IBM announced their upcoming BladeCenter products that will support 4S Nehalem-EX blades and Super-Micro announced a 1U box, specifically targeted at HPC. Staying on the HPC theme, Mark Seager from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was also quoted with stating that “Nehalem-EX allows us to invest in science, not the computer science of porting and adapting software to new architectures, but real science. Nehalem EX is an innovative SMP on a chip solution that provides us access to a “super node” … The result is an astonishing new level of performance.”

And Oracle Open World on October 13^th, the drumbeat for Nehalem-EX continued. Michael Dell in his Oracle Open World Keynote today discussed how Nehalem-EX will provide a true leap in performance, with up to 9x the memory bandwidth and 3x the database performance vs. prior generation. And he mentioned that Dell’s unique implementation of the memory architecture will allow the most cost effective scaling, with 4S systems up to 1TB of DRAM (64 Dimms x 16GB Memory sticks) enabling customers to run their entire database in system memory. He also mentioned that standard based systems are driving new efficiencies with applications like Oracle, where Dell’s data shows Oracle apps run better on x86 vs. proprietary architectures, up to 200% better. Check out this short video from the keynote and watch what Michael Dell had to say.

Keep your eyes on the Server Room for more Nehalem-EX news as it comes between now and launch. And visit the Intel booth at South Moscone Booth #1621 to learn more.

Bryce

Sun Solaris Is Getting Ready For Nehalem-EX - Is Your Data Center?

greg.okeefe@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:45:59 GMT

Sun has recently published a whitepaper that discusses how the Solaris OS will take advantage of the next generation Intel Xeon processor (codename Nehalem-EX) for expandable servers (4 sockets & greater). Sun with over 20 years of experience in larger socket, core & threading capabilities is working to have the Solaris OS be ready to take advantage of the features & new capabilities of “Nehalem-EX”. The three areas of collaboration for Solaris & Nehalem-EX are around scalable performance; advanced reliability and energy efficiency between the specific features in Solaris and the next generation Intel Xeon processor. Read this recently published whitepaper

Nehalem - The Cash Machine that Keeps on Giving…For IT

bryce.olson@intel.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:17:36 GMT

In March '09, former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger predicted that Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 servers would become "cash machines" for the IT industry, due to unprecedented power-efficient performance gains that can deliver a very short ROI for IT. Pat's description of the Xeon 5500 was validated during a briefing with Intel CIO Diane Bryant in San Francisco on October 6^th, as reported in TG Daily.

She discussed the ROI achieved and the impact that a proactive serve refresh strategy has had on Intel’s bottom line, as reported in PC World. Some of her key points:

· Intel is expecting up to $250M savings over 8 years, saved $45M in 2008 alone.

· Despite these results, economy forced Intel to re-evaluate capital spending in 2009. Found that delaying server refresh would cost us $19M more than continuing. So we continued.

· Getting an average of 10:1 server consolidation with Xeon 5500 in design computing environment and 20:1 virtualization server refresh ratios in Office/Enterprise.

Did you know that Server Refresh is also the #1 driver of Intel’s Carbon Footprint reduction as well, with an initiative to reduce Carbon footprint by 5% per year. We are projected to reduce by approximately 4K metric tons (2009) and this server refresh strategy is forecasted to be #1 project to help IT reduce Carbon.

Staying on the green IT theme, the newest ally for IT to help drive carbon-reduction and energy cost savings is the energy utilities. A prime example of this is the Energy Trust of Oregon, who offers cash incentives to motivate Oregon businesses to make energy saving investments. Intel gained access to a $250K incentive from them as a result of energy savings gained by replacing older servers with newer, more energy-efficient servers in our data centers. If you are replacing older servers with modern energy-efficient Xeon 5500 based servers and you haven’t had this conversation with your utility yet – please do so. You may be eligible for utility incentives for energy savings that can lower your operating costs and reduce the impact of your business on the environment. To estimate the energy savings associated with server refresh, go to www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator.

You’re going to hear more about these “cash machines” in the very near future…stay tuned!

Bryce

So I’m picking up my rental car…

edward.g.groden@intel.com — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:29:15 GMT

…on my way to a customer meeting, and the thought dawns on me about why the car I’m getting into is a relatively new, clean 2008 compact car and not a 1966 Chevy Impala, which probably has enough steel to dramatically distort the earth’s local magnetic field. Well the reasons are fairly simple:

Newer cars are more reliable and require less maintenance - cars in the shop don’t make the rental car agency money, and don’t make customers happy if they break down
Newer cars are typically more fuel efficient - that ’66 Impala’s gas mileage might be quoted in gallons per mile J
Newer cars typically fall under a manufacturer warranty

As with rental cars, servers aren’t much different. It’s all about keeping your business running smoothly, minimizing your operating costs, and keeping your customers happy. While I’m guessing not many of today’s data centers have the server equivalent of a ’66 Impala in them, there are probably a bunch ready to be removed from the rental car fleet.

Think about it on your next business trip, and check out the benefits of refreshing servers that are only 3 or 4 years old with the Xeon® ROI estimator tool (link: www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator).

Fall IDF: Have You Seen the Pasta Machine (IOV demos) At Work?

iddo.kadim@intel.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:34:18 GMT

In my previous post Fall IDF: Is Italian Pasta the Actual Inspiration for Server Virtualization? I talked about the evolution of Server I/O virtualization. I mentioned a few demos and invited you to check them out. But I didn’t give any details about the demos…

Well, it's the 3rd and last day of IDF today and the demos have running now for 2 days. You have one moreday to check them out! So let me describe them quickly.

Dell has been a great partner for these demos. We’re showing 2 demos together in booths 709 and 711 in the Virtualization Community, using Dell’s R710 servers, based on the Xeon 5500 platform, and using Intel 82599 (Niantic) with Virtual Machine Direct Connect (VMDc). The 1^st demo is with VMware and their Network Plug-In Architecture (NPA) technology.

When you visit the demo, check out the great CPU utilization as well VMotion* among heterogeneous server configurations!

The 2^nd demo is delivered with Citrix, showing scalable direct assignment by using XenServer with VT-d and SR-IOV support. The overall performance is really great and live relocation of virtual machines is working nicely.

Another demo (booth 707) is delivered by Red Hat, featuring RHEL 5.4 with KVM (shipping SW with VT-d and SR-IOV support!), Neterion with their 10GbE NIC, all running on an Intel Xeon 5500 server. Look out for the performance value shown for scalable direct assignment!

And finally, a storage (not LAN) demo! Using the same combination of VMM and server, in booth 517, LSI is showing the value of scalable direct assignment for a RAID controller. The performance boost is fantastic!

Check out these demos at the IDF Showcase... I’d love to hear your impressions!

From Geek Heaven to Geek Nirvana...visiting the Datacenter 2020 Test Lab on the way to IDF

allyson.klein@intel.com — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:56:35 GMT

I am an IDF veteran...I've attended too many IDFs to remember and I have developed a couple of truisms about the event.

#1 Geeks will be on hand. As one of them it's kind of like spending a week with my people. People who get more excited about, say, the latest I/O bus compared to Milan's latest fashions.

#2 The Geeks on hand will not be disappointed. If there is one thing that Intel can be counted on in doing this week it's showcasing some pretty cool technology across all of the market segments we operate in. We'll also bring some very big name industry leaders on-stage to talk about what they're doing to create our collective future.

In the past couple of weeks I've been travelling across the world working on a few last minute items for the event, and I happened to be in Munich for the Intel/T-Systems Data Center 2020 Test Lab opening event. This was a big announcement by T-Systems (the enterprise arm of Deutche Telecom and sister organization to T-Mobile) and Intel. The Data Center 2020 Test Lab was developed by the two companies with the express purpose of developing data center best practices for tomorrow's datacenter requirements. The initial focus of the lab will center on data center efficiency best practices and specifically cooling efficiency. And this is a fantastic thing that the industry and our customers will all benefit from...but this is not what was most exciting to me about the test lab...

I visited the test lab the day before the opening to get a preview and was given a tour by Herr Meier from T-Systems. As we walked towards the lab I noticed a glint in his eye that told me he was very proud of what he was about to share with me...and soon I realized why. If you could imagine the most ideal data center configuration for the Data Center 2020 project you'd be close to what Herr Meier showed me. The data center itself is small, but the features of the facility highlight the degree of data collection that can be measured and analyzed. Features included: depressurized air at 10K feet altitude, raising and lowering ceiling height, smoke system to track air circulation, cold aisle containment cabinets, water cooled rack for cross comparison, and floor tiles that allowed for acute control of airflow. And enough sensors to measure every micro adjustment in efficiency gains across a multitude of testing variables. If this sounds nearly as cool to you as it was to me, I'd encourage you to attend the joint T-Systems Intel session at IDF this week in the Eco-Technology track and see the T-Systems demo in the Eco-Tech community. And to learn more (in English too soon) visit www.datacenter2020.de

See you all at IDF!

The Most Energy Efficient Investment That Government Won’t Help You Make

bryce.olson@intel.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:39:41 GMT

First there was the Multi-Billion Dollar Automobile “Cash for Clunkers” program that I wrote about back in early August. Then in late August we started reading more about the planned $300M state-run rebate programs for consumer purchases of new ENERGY STAR® qualified home appliances. Appliance categories eligible for rebates include: central air conditioners, heat pumps (air source and geothermal), boilers, furnaces (oil and gas), room air conditioners, clothes washers, dishwashers, freezers, refrigerators, and water heaters.

The government wants to make cars and homes more energy efficient, while helping to support the nation’s economic recovery. But what about making Data Centers more efficient?

A couple of years ago the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the energy consumption associated with data centers had doubled between 2000 and 2006, reaching some 60 billion kWh in 2006, roughly 1.5% of the entire US energy use. The EPA says this is expected to double again by 2010. The same authors of that report previously calculated that US servers currently use the same level of electricity as all color TVs in the country combined.

So this got me thinking…which industries have done the most to increase output per energy unit and which products also offer the most attractive paybacks when you invest in them. The findings were interesting to say the least. Let’s first look at the sectors creating more energy-efficient products over the last 30 years*.

Autos – 1978 (14.3 MPG), 2008 (20 MPG): Energy Efficiency gains = 40%
Airlines – 1978 (22.8 Revenue passenger MPG), 2008 (50.4): Energy Efficiency gains = 121%
Agriculture – 1978 (0.63 units of output per unit of energy use), 2008 (1.46): Energy Efficiency gains = 132%
Steel Mfg – 1978 (63 lbs of steel per MBtu), 2008 (167 lbs): Energy Efficiency gains = 167%
Lighting – 1978 (Incandescent light bulb – 13 lumens per watt), 2008 (Compact Fluorescent Bulb – 57 lumens per watt): Energy Efficiency gains = 339%
Computer Systems – 1978 (1,400 instructions per second per watt), 2008 (40,000,000 instructions per second per watt): Energy Efficiency gains = 2,857,000%

*Source: “A Smarter Shade of Green,” ACEEE Report for the Technology CEO Council, 2008.

Next let’s look at some big ticket energy efficient products that offer the most attractive paybacks on their investments. (Note: Buying a hybrid automobile wouldn’t make this list below in terms of rapid payback, hence not included.)

Central Air Conditioning: 4.7 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator (I used Los Angeles as Location)
Freezer: 4.3 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
Refrigerator: 2.8 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
Commercial Ice Machine: 2.1 year payback per Energy Star Savings Calculator
New Intel Xeon 5500 based Server: 9 months payback per the Xeon ROI estimator at www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator. (I modeled refreshing from older 2005 Single-Core servers, getting 10:1 server consolidation ratio.)

IT industry far exceeds others at increasing output per energy unit… and Intel servers also offer a faster payback on investment than other energy efficient products (including Energy Star Products). Yet there is not government stimulus package to help encourage these purchases in energy efficiency. Simply, this is the most energy efficient investment that the government won’t help you make.

I would be curious to hear what you think.

bryce

Packing even more performance per rack with the new Xeon L5530

edward.g.groden@intel.com — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:28:10 GMT

Last month, Intel added another high-performing, low power to the Xeon 5500 SKU lineup with the Intel Xeon L5530 processor (2.40 GHz, 60W TDP). As with the L5506 (2.13 GHz) and L5520 (2.26 GHz) SKUs that were launched in March, the L5530 deliver the same performance as its 80W counterpart (E5530), but at 25% lower CPU power.

With space being a valuable asset in power-constrained data centers (IDC estimates datacenter construction costs at an average of $1,000/sq ft and $40,000/rack), the Xeon L5530 delivers even more performance in the same 60W CPU power envelope to help get the most out of each rack. Here’s the tale of the tape:

66% more performance than previous generation Xeon L5420 SKU
45% more performance than the Xeon L5506 SKU

(performance numbers based on SPEC_int_rate2006*, see http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/ for more details)

Want to find out more about the Xeon L5530 and the rest of the 5500 lineup, check out: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/products/server/processor/xeon5000

Fall IDF: Is Italian Pasta the Actual Inspiration for Server Virtualization?

iddo.kadim@intel.com — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:30:28 GMT

I love food! Since I was a kid I’ve loved noodles, especially Italian pasta. I used to think that Spaghetti was the general name for Italian noodles. Learning how to twist Spaghetti on a fork gave a great sense of achievement and joy.

Many years later my wife and I travelled to Rome. Naturally – both of us really love food, we spent a lot of time seeking out restaurants and checking out new food. One of the wonderful dishes we had was Pappardelle (on the left) with Duck Ragu. It was my 1^st encounter with Pappardelle –a very wide form of pasta. You get only a few Pappardelle on your plate but it’s still the same amount of pasta. I found it not as practical to twist the Pappardelle around my fork, so I cut them up into smaller pieces to eat them.

I’ve thought about it recently when I looked at the back of a virtualized server. Looks similar, no? J

A typical virtualized server has 8-10 1Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) ports, and 2 Fibre Channel ports. This makes for a lot of cabling, and many add-in cards. It translates to a lot of cost, power, and complexity (and thus reliability risk) for an IT shop. As a result, there’s a lot of buzz around high-speed networks, specifically 10GbE. That technology presents the opportunity to consolidate all these 1GbE ports to a significantly smaller number of higher bandwidth, i.e. 10GbE ports. It makes for a much tidier server.

Kind of like substituting Pappardelle for SpaghettiJ

In that case, iSCSI or FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) could be used for the SAN connection, still using the same high-speed ports. Standards like Data Center Bridging (DCB) could add a lossless character to the 10GbE link to make it friendlier to FCoE.

Few new solutions though come without new challenges. The common way for VMs to share I/O devices in a today’s environment in through mediation of the hypervisor, using emulation or para-virtualization. That reduces the effective I/O bandwidth. It also becomes a fairly significant overhead to the server in its own right, reducing the available server capacity for application processing, and it adds latency. With the growing trend in IT to treat virtualization as a default deployment mode for any application, these issues become quite limiting.

We at Intel have thought that the best way to overcome these issues is by using “direct assignment”. Using the Intel® VT-d technology (launched in the Xeon 5500 platform), a VM can be assigned a dedicated I/O device. This nearly eliminates the overheard related to the hypervisor mediation I mentioned above. A side benefit is that it increases the VM to VM isolation and security. But assigning an individual I/O device to one VM is not very scalable…

This is where the PCI-SIG’s SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) standard comes into play. This standard allows a single I/O device to present itself as multiple virtual devices. With SR-IOV, each virtual device can be assigned to a VM, adding scalability to the direct assignment model, effectively allowing the physical I/O to be shared yet with greater security and reliability.

Another challenge with the direct assignment model is related to live migration. Hypervisors have typically assumed the SW mediated IOV model. As a result, hypervisors need to be modified to adapt their live migration solutions to direct assignment.

These technologies span many different components of the server platform. Intel® VT-d is necessary, so Xeon 5500 must be used (or later platforms). SR-IOV capable I/O devices – NICs or Storage controllers, are required. BIOS must be modified, as well as hypervisor software. This is pretty heavy lifting.

So you can only imagine how excited I am to be able to showcase 4 different SR-IOV demos at IDF next week! The demos involve 2 server vendors, 3 VMM vendors – 3 different vendors implementing 3 different hypervisor architectures, and 3 different IHVs representing 2 different I/O technologies. We show the performance improvements, as well as VM live-migration. It works!

Come and see it (Booths 517, 707, 709, and 711 in the IDF showcase)!